The Missing Link - Cover story
The memristor – the recently discovered fourth circuit element – could be a major enabling technology. By Graham Pitcher.
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The electronics industry is fertile ground when it comes to innovation. Whether you’re looking at new circuit techniques or advanced manufacturing processes, there is always work underway – aimed at producing smaller devices which run faster, use less power and cost less.
Yet all this work is at the leading edge of technology; pushing the boundaries of what we know by tweaking the things we already work with. What is unusual is a discovery which effectively changes the rules.
And that is what a research team from HP Labs is claiming with the discovery of the memristor – said to be the fourth basic circuit element. But the story starts much further back than you might imagine.